The present invention is about a traction sheave elevator, without the machine room.
As it is known, in the past, because of the norms that regulated the construction procedures, the installation of elevators and similar devices had to be equipped with appropriate spaces, named machine room, wherein the lifting apparatus and its respective actuation and control equipment were placed, causing thus the need of arranging technical spaces for such equipment, with its relative costs.
In more recent years, following the changes in the elevators' construction and installation regulations, different solutions have been adopted which do not require the presence of specific rooms suitable for the actuation equipment, since the traction machinery gets placed directly inside the elevator shaft or in any case somewhere within the shaft's walls dimensions, while the actuation and control equipment could have been placed inside a cabinet situated relative to the floor served by the elevator, connected with the upper or lower end, preferably, with the equipment's position.
Through the use of such apparatuses, which are described for example by the EP patents 0631968, 0680920, 0719724 and by many other documents, the maintenance operations can be carried out on the actuation and control equipment, operating on the landing where the cabinet is situated, in a position thus external to the shaft, while in order to access the equipment is necessary to be inside the elevator shaft, therefore without being able to simultaneously carry out the maintenance of the actuation or control equipment and the traction machinery.
In the above mentioned cases the equipment is accessible to the maintenance operations only from inside the shaft either by putting oneself over the elevator car's roof, or else by positioning oneself inside the shaft's lower end in the pit usually built below the elevator car, or even by operating through inspection doors placed into the shaft's side walls.
Another kind of solution that also provides a traction machinery inside the elevator shaft, as for example described in the EP patent 0922663, the accessibility to the equipment for the maintenance operations is possible thanks to a platform inside the shaft, to which the maintenance person must access in order to operate.
In this case, from the platform the maintenance person is able to simultaneously access the traction machinery as well as the actuation and control equipment, but however this solution does not fully allow the elevator to do its entire run during the maintenance operations, because of the presence of the platform inside the shaft; furthermore it is anyhow necessary to operate from inside the elevator shaft with all its relative difficulties.
In all of the previously described solutions, in the event that the elevator car gets stuck at the traction machinery working station's height inside the shaft, the access turns out to be seriously endangered or even prevented and thus the maintenance and/or rescue operations are considerably complicated.